Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

Jonas keeps his eyes on the ground. Knows he ought to tell them something, a story so good that it will get him out of this situation, but he can’t think of anything.

‘So you’ve been up in our den?’

Jonas feels everything go black. In his memory this incident would always seem like an eclipse. He could have admitted it, apologized, been given a belt round the ear and that would have been that. But there is nothing but blackness. Jonas discovers that he has a dark cave inside himself, a dragon carved into his head. He says nothing. This is what it comes down to: the art of saying nothing. He has no chance of beating Petter in a fight. But he can keep his mouth shut. A partial victory. Or a partial defeat.

Petter doesn’t punch Jonas. That’s not how boys fight. Petter wrestles Jonas roughly to the ground, just beside the stone monument to the fallen of the Second World War, where a wreath was laid every May 17. Jones sprawls on the grass, nonchalantly, or hopefully even, knows that this is what he wanted, to lie here and see whether what he thought would happen actually would happen, whether life is that predictable. He gazes at the broad, empty steps up to the square in front of the church, where the girls’ choir used to stand and sing like an angelic chorus.

Petter kicks him, not very hard, more as an indication that worse is to come: ‘Admit you were in our den.’

Jonas lies still, playing dead the way you’re told to do if attacked by a bear — something that all boys regard as a not-so-remote possibility. There is something about Jonas’s stubborn silence that makes Petter madder than he had planned to be. He throws himself down onto Jonas’s chest, pins his arms down with his knees and hits him in the face, quite hard. ‘Admit it, you snotty little twerp,’ Petter says, louder now.

Jonas is admitting nothing. This is his only weapon: to keep his mouth shut, deprive them of that pleasure. Although he knows it would be smartest to own up, since this would entail a symbolic and not too unbearable punishment: Chinese burns, maybe, or something of the sort. But now the big boys are losing face, and big boys don’t like to lose face: still less do they like being defied by brats three years their junior. Such things get out. Besides which, Jonas senses that something he has not foreseen may be about to happen, a possibility that almost gives him hope. Petter is capable of anything; on one occasion he locked some poor sod in the cold-storage room at the shopping centre for so long that the guy almost snuffed it.

‘D’you give in?’ Petter grunts. ‘Just say you give in.’ Jonas understands that Petter is holding out his hand, offering the chance of a compromise. Jonas does not even meet his eye.

Jonas lies on his back in the church grounds. The grass is cold and damp. Just across from him is Trygve Lie’s tombstone. Petter punches him in the face. Jonas says nothing. Petter punches him again, harder this time, Jonas says nothing, Petter punches him again and again, harder and harder, Jonas says nothing, Petter hits him so hard that Jonas begins to bleed, first from a split lip, then from his nose, but he does not open his mouth. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jonas, can’t you just say you were in there?’ Petter all but begs, staying a final, dangerously hard blow.

Last chance. Jonas is admitting nothing. They know he’s been there, but he’s not going to admit it, so he hasn’t been there. That’s the way of it. That’s the law.

Petter crouches over him, his fist clenched. Jonas can taste blood, but he’s not so much frightened as curious.

There is something unresolved about the situation. Ørn is standing there. The other big boys are standing there. The expression ‘lost honour’ hangs in the air. Petter gets up. They know they’ll have to come up with something else, something dreadful, something that will show the world, show all the other brats, that it did not pay, it most certainly did not pay, to climb up and sniff around in the secret dens of big boys.

‘Let’s chuck ’im into a grave,’ somebody volunteered. Not really meaning it seriously. More as a threat, a terrible threat. A hair-raising threat. An impossibility. The very thought made Jonas go rigid. Suddenly this was no longer fun. He longed for a return to predictability.

Petter noted Jonas’s reaction, seized his chance: ‘Yeah, let’s dump him in a grave. I know where there’s one.’

They trailed Jonas across the ground, which was strewn with chestnuts — Ørn and he always made believe that the green shells were oysters and the nuts were pearls — dragged him between them to an area roughly in the middle of the graveyard, where it sloped downwards. One of the other boys chased Ørn off home, forcibly, much as one would shoo away a crow. They reached a spot where a fresh grave had been dug for a funeral the following day. The pile of earth was covered with a tarpaulin; the grave was framed by wooden boards, the hole itself covered by planks. The day was growing steadily darker, the headstones cut adrift from the ground, swam menacingly towards them. Jonas didn’t really think they would go through with it, but he was scared all the same, more scared than he had ever been in his life.

One of the boys stepped up and pulled away a plank, shrank back from the black hole. ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,’ he said. ‘Come one,’ said Petter. Jonas felt like pleading with them, was suddenly willing to lick the soles of their shoes, eat worms, anything. But his willpower had a life of its own, refused to let him open his mouth. His body on the other hand, his body reacted. From somewhere he found incredible strength, wriggled like mad, while the tears gushed uncontrollably and little whimpers issued from his throat. They managed to hold onto him, shoved him down into the grave, may even have been a little surprised themselves at how deep it was, at least six feet — and only three feet wide. Jonas hurt himself as he hit the bottom, thought he might have twisted his ankle. They dropped the plank into place. Jonas heard them dragging something heavy on top of it, a park bench.

The boys went off. Jonas could not move. Not because of his foot, but because he was numb — his whole body was numb, numb from sheer terror. He had never actually been afraid of the dark, he liked the autumn, games of hide and seek, cones of light cutting through the gloom like lighthouse beams, but this impenetrable blackness, the association with death and the total absence of anything for the eye to fix on, scared the shit out of him. And his fear seemed to make the darkness even blacker. He was sitting in a chamber that was closing in around him. Or stretching out into infinity. It was so dark that his scream was strangled at birth. Then, all at once, time and space were no more. He could not tell up from down, was plunged into a kind of vertigo, he was weightless, floating around, or maybe he was just falling so slowly that he thought he was floating, falling down into a black hole, down through a fissure leading to an unknown physical space, maybe he was in another galaxy, maybe he…yes, maybe he was actually already dead.

There was a raw smell, like clay, the thought of pottery, modelling, flashed through his mind. He felt that he was fighting: that he was sitting motionless, benumbed, or floating free, but that he was fighting, fighting something evil, the Devil, and they were battling for command of his wits. He got it into his head that at any minute skeletal hands would come squirming out of the sides of the hole and fasten on him, skulls would be grinning at him. He remembered all those horror stories about being buried alive, films the bigger boys had talked about, scenes in which people were dug out with their fingertips in tatters and the coffin lids covered in scratches from their attempts to claw their way out.